Happy Halloween.

It was a bitter-sweet Halloween weekend.  We had some good Halloween fun, but we also said some sad goodbyes.  On Friday, we had a Halloween themed open-mic night.  I got to play my djembe with some other musicians, which was great.  I didn't dress up though, because Saturday night was the real Halloween party.  And I was reminded, on Saturday when I didn't have a costume or any ideas, how much I dislike dressing up for Halloween - well, I dislike it before hand, but afterwards I'm glad I did dress up.  Anyway, there I was Saturday afternoon, in my apartment, with no costume.  Other friends were dressing up as Star Wars characters and I had wanted to be Yoda, but all I had for it was green face paint.  That wasn't enough, so I scratched that idea.  It was too late to go out and buy a costume, and that's not very creative.  So I decided to use what I had in my apartment.  I had a textbook.  An old Educational Psychology textbook that I picked up somewhere for free, but that I, let's be honest, wasn't ever going to read.  I decided it would work for my Halloween costume.  I went as a textbook.


I looked a little frumpy, but oh well.


Then Sunday was our farewell dinner to Dan and Natasha.  They are the awesome married couple who Alisa and I have gotten pretty close to and are very sad to see leave.  But they live in Ottawa, so we promised that we'd go camping together this next summer.  It was a very good dinner and a fitting goodbye full of Dan telling unbelievable stories about his terrible students who didn't learn anything because all they did in class was fight each other - which is how many evenings with Dan and Natasha ended up being.  We're going to miss them a lot.

This was our goodbye cinnamon-roll hug.  Dan and Natasha are the happy ones in the middle.

But Halloween wasn't over yet because today our school had our Halloween party, which meant that I had to dress up, again.  It turned out pretty well actually.  I decided the textbook idea was a little dull for kindergarteners, so with face paint, Alisa, our co-teacher Roman, and I decided to be puppy dogs.  We looked pretty good, I'd say.

It was a fun day.  Our students looked very cute.  And that's the end of another Halloween.

Mentioning the open-mic night earlier reminded me of last weekend when I had another chance to play my djembe with some others.  A friend had somehow gotten a gig playing downtown, on a stage in the middle of the walking road (if you're not from around here, let me just say, that's a big deal - to me at least).  We played Saturday and Sunday and both nights we came on stage after a group of middle school dancers who were a little more high energy than us (but who also were dancing to some terribly vulgar music).  Unfortunately, when we got on, most of the crowd had dispersed and we had a hard time drawing them back.  But I don't think we sounded too bad.  And it was fun playing my djembe.

Thanks for reading,

Michael